Maven deploy to Sonatype Nexus "401 Premission Denied" workaround

My current infrastructure has an instance of Jenkins as the Continuous Integration server and Sonatype Nexus as the repository manager. The POMs for my project and the settings.xml file for maven are configured so that Jenkins can automatically deploy SNAPSHOTs to the Nexus repository but the problem arose when I had a build that went to production and I needed to deploy that pre-built artifact to Nexus’ RELEASE repository. This was easier that going back and checking out the correct versions of the many dependencies. In the future I’ll use the maven-release-plugin but for now, this is how I solved this problem.

First up, this is snippet from the maven output that shows the 401 response. I’m trying to deploy my artifact with a modified POM (to remove the snapshot tag) to Nexus via its exposed web API.

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-deploy-plugin:2.7:deploy-file (default-cli) on project standalone-pom: Failed to update metadata au.org.aekos:mywebapp/maven-metadata.xml: Could not write metadata /home/path/to/mavenrepo/com/group/mywebapp/maven-metadata-releases.xml: /home/path/to/mavenrepo/com/group/mywebapp/mywebapp/maven-metadata-releases.xml (Permission denied) -> [Help 1]

…and you see more of the log output here:

ubuntu@server:~/$ mvn deploy:deploy-file -Durl=http://my-server.com/nexus/content/repositories/releases/ -DrepositoryId=releases -Dfile=mywebapp-1.0-20121221.065121-119.war -DpomFile=mywebapp-1.0-20121221.065121-119.pom -DuniqueVersion=false -Dsources=mywebapp-1.0-20121221.065121-119-sources.jar
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] 
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Maven Stub Project (No POM) 1
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] 
[INFO] --- maven-deploy-plugin:2.7:deploy-file (default-cli) @ standalone-pom ---
Uploading: http://my-server.com/nexus/content/repositories/releases/au/org/aekos/mywebapp/1.0.0/mywebapp-1.0.0.war
Uploaded: http://my-server.com/nexus/content/repositories/releases/au/org/aekos/mywebapp/1.0.0/mywebapp-1.0.0.war (19503 KB at 8550.2 KB/sec)
Uploading: http://my-server.com/nexus/content/repositories/releases/au/org/aekos/mywebapp/1.0.0/mywebapp-1.0.0.pom
Uploaded: http://my-server.com/nexus/content/repositories/releases/au/org/aekos/mywebapp/1.0.0/mywebapp-1.0.0.pom (10 KB at 190.4 KB/sec)
Downloading: http://my-server.com/nexus/content/repositories/releases/au/org/aekos/mywebapp/maven-metadata.xml
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 4.829s
[INFO] Finished at: Mon Dec 24 14:14:29 CST 2012
[INFO] Final Memory: 7M/59M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-deploy-plugin:2.7:deploy-file (default-cli) on project standalone-pom: Failed to update metadata au.org.aekos:mywebapp/maven-metadata.xml: Could not write metadata /home/path/to/mavenrepo/com/group/mywebapp/maven-metadata-releases.xml: /home/path/to/mavenrepo/com/group/mywebapp/mywebapp/maven-metadata-releases.xml (Permission denied) -> [Help 1]
[ERROR] 
[ERROR] To see the full stack trace of the errors, re-run Maven with the -e switch.
[ERROR] Re-run Maven using the -X switch to enable full debug logging.
[ERROR] 
[ERROR] For more information about the errors and possible solutions, please read the following articles:
[ERROR] [Help 1] http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/MojoExecutionExceptions

The workaround for this issue is to bypass the web API and deploy it directly on the local filesystem. I could do this because I have SSH access to the server but obviously, if you don’t have access then this won’t work for you. Here’s the command that I ran:

mvn deploy:deploy-file \
  -Durl=file:///path/to/nexus/sonatype-work/nexus/storage/releases/ \
  -Dfile=mywebapp-1.0-20121221.065121-119.war \
  -DpomFile=mywebapp-1.0-20121221.065121-119.pom \
  -DuniqueVersion=false

The difference to note is the URL, I use a file path for the local filesystem rather than a URL to talk to Nexus. In this way, we deploy it straight the the maven repo and Nexus will simply notice it is there and update itself.